Backup and recovery software is well known in the art. Many software packages will create non-bootable backup images of system drives and bootable images of system drives. Those software packages that create non-bootable images of system drives generally use a bootable operating system residing on a CD or DVD. Also generally, these bootable operating systems are Linux based and also include an application that will restore software programs from the backup to the system drive. The software program will typically create a bootable drive on the old system drive or will create a bootable drive on a new fresh raw system drive and then transfer the image from the externally attached drive to the system drive.
The second type of backup software package will create a bootable image of the system drive that is capable of being booted over an external bus such as USB or 1394. This latter technique generally requires the user to change the boot order of the system BIOS or requires the software to change the settings of the system BIOS.
This generally creates two possible problems. The first is that the average user cannot or will not change the boot settings of the system BIOS, because doing so can be an intimidating task at best. Most IT departments of large companies have policies prohibiting the user from actually gaining access to the system BIOS. A second problem is that the system BIOS is generally different from one model computer to the next and one general purpose software module can never stay up to day with all of the possible system BIOS modules.